India and its relation with Buddhism

                                             

               //Dhamek Stupa, Sarnath//

Sarnath is a place located 10 kilometers north-east of Varanasi River, near the confluence of the River Ganges and the River Varuna, in Uttar Pradesh, India.

Sarnath is a Buddhist pilgrim spot located near Varanasi. The city is famous for being the first place where Lord Buddha preached after attaining his enlightenment. King Ashoka, who was an ardent devotee of Lord Buddha and followed the preaching's of Buddhism constructed lot of Stupas and other structures which were based on the teachings of Buddhism.

It was built by King Ashoka in the year 500CE. For more than 1500 years , Sarnath Stupa served as a learning center for Buddhism and people from all across the world visit here to get a glimpse of it.

The place has got it name from the Sanskrit word " Sarnath" meaning "Lord of the Deer"  which relates to another old Buddhist story in which the Bodhisattva is a deer and offers his life to a king instead of the doe the latter is planning to kill. The king is so moved that he creates the park as a sanctuary for deer.

But why did he choose Sarnath? Buddhist texts tell you that the five men who had accompanied Buddha on his journey and later abandoned him, had settled in Sarnath. So after Buddha gained his enlightenment in Gaya, he realised that he should go and tell those five men about what he learned and so he went to Sarnath to preach his teachings for the first time and his first teaching was referred as "Dharmachakrapravartana Sutra" that means " the turning of the wheel of the law".